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Depressed dads affect their kids’ speech development

By Peter Aldhous

Fathers get the baby blues too and, if they do, it can be bad news for their children’s language development. Two-year-olds have a smaller vocabulary if their fathers have depression than if their mothers do.

Postnatal depression in women is widely recognised and linked to emotional and behavioural difficulties in their children. Less well known is that some men also become depressed soon after a child is born. To explore the effects of paternal depression, a team led by paediatric psychologist James Paulson at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk surveyed about 5000 families enrolled …